Building The Basic, Badass Home Theater
Part One: Getting PreparedWritten by Jerry Del CollianoWelcome
to Part One of a series of articles designed to teach you the inside
tricks, tips and advice needed to help you build a top performing yet
entry level home theater. As much as we all want a $1,500,000 media
room in our homes, most of us aren’t capable of footing the bill. This
series is designed to get you thinking about all of the elements you
need to make your $5,000 (and up) home theater perform like a set-up
costing many, many times more than your investment.

Picking and Preparing Your RoomFor
most AV enthusiasts, it seems pretty obvious which room your theater
should go in, but before you get too far into the project, take a
second to think about who uses your theater and where they use it the
most. If you have a large family and they watch lots of TV or movies,
you will want to pick a high-traffic area of your house. If you are
building an escape to enjoy your music and HDTV movies that is more for
you alone, you might consider a basement or converting an extra
bedroom. One key element in deciding which room to use is picking a
room that can be made pitch dark if needed. If there are skylights in
your living room, expect your TV picture to look washed out during the
day. If you are never home during the day, then it isn’t that much of
an issue. The goal is to get you thinking about how you will use your
system before you start buying gear.

Once you have settled on the room, you will want to consider how you
can make it ready for a topnotch theater system, no matter what your
budget. If you are a renter, tearing up walls to run cables is likely
too costly and problematic. If you own a condo or a house, I recommend
considering tearing open your walls to run cables, add dedicated
circuits for electrical needs and potentially add in-wall speakers.
While there is mess created by poking holes in the walls, the end
result is far superior to the clutter found in most theaters. Many
wives hate big AV systems because they rarely ever look finished or
neat. If you tear up the walls and hide your cables like a pro, you
will have overcome potential objections from the get-go. Expect to pay
a drywall contractor $400 to $750 to patch the holes, or you can do the
work yourself. You can do your own painting or hire a contractor to do
it for $200 or so, depending on the job.

Creating
a floor plan for your media room is a great way to build a theater from
scratch or rebuild your system after years of additions and
subtractions to your beloved collection of gear. Do some measurements
of the dimensions of your room, including ceiling heights, doorways and
other elements. If you are doing your drawings by hand, be sure to get
the general dimensions of the room on a master sheet and make copies.
This allows you to try different layouts of gear, speakers and
furniture that you might buy. Involving your better half in this
process is the way to get what you want when it comes down to plunking
down the platinum card on that 60-inch rear projection big screen.

When considering your media room, think about the acoustical elements
in it, such as drapes, carpet, wall coverings, ceiling textures and
more. I find most theaters are too “live” or reflective. Glass walls,
hardwood floors and coffee tables add to this effect. It is possible to
make a room overly dead or absorptive, but this is not normally the
case at the entry level. Consider adding a fabric wall on the walls
beside your left, right and center speakers. The improvement in imaging
can be radical. If you are handy, you can install a faux wall with
reasonably affordable, fire-retardant acoustical dampening material. At
the Audio Video Revolution offices in Beverly Hills, we had our
designer create a fabric wall as a design element. We bought pretty
upmarket fabric for the wall, resulting in a total cost of about
$1,200, including installation. In other cities, this would be less.
Also your choice of fabrics is the largest cost factor you can make in
this decision. There are fabrics for $20 per yard that will look
fantastic. I have also seen home theaters with 40-foot-long walls and
12-foot-high ceilings with $375 per yard fabric. This is a bit extreme,
but the effect of a fabric wall can be very striking. It also allows
you to better hide side channel speakers in the wall where no one can
see them, resulting in less clutter without any level of compromise in
performance.

I
can’t stress how important your room is to the overall success of your
system. You can spend $100,000 on equipment and not be able to correct
simple acoustical problems that are easily dealt with before you head
out to buy your equipment. Fabric side walls help. Hanging an
unobtrusive treatment above and slightly in front of your main speakers
is also an amazing acoustical improvement for any home theater. This
treatment absorbs the first order sonic reflections on the ceiling and
really helps to sharpen your image. Creating a complex texture on the
back wall of your theater also helps to diffuse energy that can wreck
your overall sound. A brick wall or your CD shelf or bookcase often
does the trick. RPG’s diffuser products have a somewhat “recording
studio look,” but they really rock. Depending on your budget, I would
highly recommend you consider calling in a guru to consult you from
afar. Bob Hodas and Rives Audio offer services starting around $500,
which include drawings and measurements of your room, as well as
recommendations on how to improve your acoustical situation as best you
can within your realistic budget constraints. For anyone looking to
spend over $15,000 total, I would recommend spending as much as $1,000
on acoustical design. The benefits can make a $1,000 pair of speakers
sound better than a $3,000 pair in many cases.

Lighting and DarknessLighting
control is one of the most overlooked elements in the basic home
theater. With your floor plan in place with furniture and gear, take
another copy of your plan and note where your lights are currently
located. Look for places where you would like to remove lights. If you
have a floodlight right above your screen for your new DLP projector,
you would be well advised to move or remove such a light. In-ceiling
lights are very slick, but track lighting is a more affordable and
comparably effective way to get light where you need it. Consider
lighting options so that you can read a book in your favorite seat
while the rest of the room is basically dark. Consider how you will be
able to see and access your equipment rack of gear in a darkened room.
Normally, one or two spots will do the trick without ruining the mood
during a movie. Calling in a professional electrician is best in this
situation. Be sure to get a dedicated circuit for your equipment rack
with at least a quad outlet for plugging in gear.

The best way to make your picture look better in the room is to make
the room as dark as possible. This sounds simpler than it usually is,
nor is it cheap in many cases. Window treatments can cost a pretty
penny, depending on the fabric you choose. I recommend ordering
blackout drapes for your windows which use multiple layers of fabric to
absorb light. You will want to flush-mount them in a track in your
ceiling or use some sort of covering for a more traditional track.
Drapes also help your acoustical situation. A more cost-effective way
to deal with window treatments is to look to stores like Pottery Barn,
Restoration Hardware or Room & Board for pre-made drapes. Do your
measurements as though you’re doing them for NASA. It is really easy to
mess up. For a few hundred dollars, you can get nice thick drapes up
that do a suitable job of blocking light. In order to create a dark
room suitable for the best in HDTV in the middle of a summer afternoon,
I am not installing windows in the dedicated theater that I am building
onto my house in Los Angeles. I have planned spaces for windows in the
room in the event someone later wants to tear out the theater and make
it into an additional bedroom or office. Getting all of the light out
of your room costs a lot more money, but your wife might consider
window treatments to be a different budget than you AV gear
acquisitions.

FurnitureWhat you park your butt on
is sometimes overlooked in a theater. In my current theater, I got
caught up in the idea of furniture as art. I bought some really
beautiful modern sofas and chairs from a designer in Paris that cost a
fortune and took seven months to arrive. No joke – seven months. While
what I bought looks cool, it wasn’t a good fit for sitting for three
hours watching the back nine at The Masters in HDTV. My mistake was
treating furniture like art, not like fashion. In 10 years, you will
want a new sofa, so it is crazy to invest in a couch that you will need
to own forever in order to increase its value.

In my new theater, I am using dedicated home theater seating for six
adults. While I find some of what the theater seating industry has to
offer is tacky (think cup holders in your armrest), there is no denying
the comfort you can get from even an affordable home theater chair. I
recently sat in a $1,200 home theater chair at a La-Z-Boy showroom. I
was impressed with the quality of the chair for the price. What is most
important, no matter what the brand, is to get a seating configuration
that allows you to suspend gravity. In other words, you need to be able
to get your feet up off the ground. If you have a sofa that you like,
consider adding an ottoman. Consider where your primary seating
positions are and budget a little more money for those spots. Consider
having some pillows made that allow guests to be able to crash on the
floor for a movie. Plush carpet is also a smart move if you think
people will sit on the floor. Modest theaters today more and more use
another surprisingly affordable trick: creating a stage that is six
inches high for the seating in the rear of the room. For a few hundred
dollars in two-by-fours and plywood and a day’s worth of labor, this
can be built into your theater, creating a dramatic effect and really
good sightlines for your guests or kids who want to sit in the back of
your theater.

Equipment RacksTraditional racks used for
audiophile systems are a sore topic with many wives, designers and
system owners who need to continually make changes to their system.
Radical improvements have been made to store-bought home theater racks,
including most importantly the ability to install a flat TV on top of
your gear.

Depending
on the size of your system, in addition to the extra components you may
purchase at some time in the future, you need to consider the size of
your rack. Personally, I prefer installed equipment racks like the kind
Middle Atlantic sells. You buy the shelves you need for the gear you
have and install them neatly in a rack, which saves space. With a
pullout style, you have easy access to the back of your rack to make
equipment or cable changes with relative ease. You can mount one or two
racks like these into a custom piece of furniture or into a closet
which you will find can create much more space in your theater.
Consider ventilation in any rack system you might install. Overheating
is a classic way to get AV equipment to fail on you. Consider ways to
get cool air into your rack, as well as sucking hot air from your rack
to another place in your home or venting it outside. The parts needed
for a pro rack could cost you between $600 to $800, depending on the
size and amount of cool custom faceplates that you order. Also be sure
to get a rack drawer for about $50, so that you have a place to store
all of your remotes in case you ever need them. Also consider
installing an AC power strip that rack-mounts with a light. I use mine
all the time when changing discs in a dark room during a listening
session.

Wife (or Husband) Acceptance Factor
It has been 10 years
since I designed home theaters for a living, but back then nothing
would derail a good system sale more than a pissed-off wife. A guy who
loves gear and spends a ton of money on his rack of components trying
to eek the last one-tenth of one percent of performance from his system
is a guy who also knows his salesperson at Tiffany’s on a first name
basis. If you play your cards right, you shouldn’t need to bribe anyone
to get the theater you want.

Sell the idea of changing your theater into a media room that will
increase the value of your home and will be a place where the entire
family and your friends will want to congregate. Pitch the idea of
making your theater look more “finished” by hiding cables,
rack-mounting your gear and using smart interior design techniques to
make the room be the best-looking space in your home. Your spouse will
start to buy into your concept.

The most important part of the process is to involve your wife or
girlfriend in the project on a number of levels. Allow her to pick the
colors for the room. If she is into it, go shopping for fabric with
her. Test seating on a Saturday afternoon at real furniture shops as
well as a few top home theater installers or retailers. If you really
want to break out the heavy ammo, find an installer and system
integrator that has a very trick AMX or Crestron touch panel remote
system set-up. Schedule a demo (the salespeople love it when you
schedule a demo) and have her run the entire system. You should never
really touch the remote. Allow her to believe that, when you are away
at work or on the golf course, she can make your pending system do
everything she wants it to do. She will quickly see that the system you
are designing is more than a tweako collection of esoteric audiophile
gear, although we aren’t going to compromise on any of the performance.
In fact, by getting your room all dialed in before you install your
theater, you have without question guaranteed better performance.

The Next Installment of Building a Basic Badass TheaterPart 2 of this series will deal with system decisions and block diagrams of possible systems, as well as budgetary concerns.